How to Sell Your eBook Through Amazon

Kindle Direct Publishing is the Amazon self-publishing service for eBooks. It is the gorilla in the market and can account for most of your sales. Amazon owns this market. Let's face it, Amazon equals online books the way Volvo equals safety and Starbucks equals coffee.





There's a wide selection of Kindle devices from Amazon as well as a Kindle app for Macintosh, Windows, BlackBerry, Android, and iOS devices. People can also read their Kindle books using web browsers. Kindle Direct Publishing is the path of least complexity, most sales, and greatest visibility for most self-published authors.






Getting started: If you have written a novel or a nonfiction book with no tables, graphics, and bulleted or numbered lists, you're in good shape with Kindle Direct Publishing. Write your book in Word, use Word's styles, design a cover (or have one designed), upload it at Kindle Direct Publishing, https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin and one to two days later, you're in business.




We want to ensure that you completely understand Kindle Direct Publishing's royalty deals. There are two rates: 70 percent and 35 percent. The 70 percent rate has these caveats:




* You must price your book between $2.99 and $9.99 in the United States. The range varies in other countries.

* Kindle Direct Publishing deducts a delivery charge from your royalty based on the file size of your book. In the United States, for example, the charge is $0.15 per megabyte. This is not a big deal if you're publishing a pure-text novel (approximately one megabyte or $0.15, unless you're a descendant of Tolstoy).

* Delivery charges in other countries are: United Kingdom: 0.10 Pounds per megabyte; Germany, France, Spain, and Italy: 0.12 Euro per megabyte; India: $0.12 (US) per megabyte.

* Kindle Direct Publishing matches prices from other resellers, and your royalty is calculated on the lower price.




The 35 percent rate, while obviously lower, has some advantages:



* There is no delivery charge.

* Kindle Direct Publishing matches prices of other resellers but continues to pay royalty based on the "digital list price" not what customers paid unless the eBook was free.




However, the size of your file determines the price range that you can use under the 35 percent plan:



* Less than or equal to three megabytes: $0.99-$200

* Greater than three megabytes but less than ten megabytes: $1-$200

* Ten megabytes or more: $2.99-$200




The 70 percent choice is not a no-brainer. You need to consider the size of your file and the delivery charge it will incur, as well as the likelihood that other resellers will heavily discount it. Kindle Direct Publishing provides an up-to-date explanation on its website https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B.

Fine print:



* Kindle Direct Publishing compresses your file. For example, What the Plus! is a fifty-four-megabyte Word file with more than one hundred pictures. Adobe InDesign turned it into a twenty-two-megabyte MOBI file. Kindle Direct Publishing compressed this file to 3.85 megabytes, so it cost approximately $0.58 to deliver each copy under the 70 percent royalty deal. (The website will tell you the delivery file size and cost estimate when you set your prices).



* Lossless Word conversion for complex books is challenging. To achieve the best possible conversion, you should upload books to Kindle Direct Publishing in the MOBI file format. Conversion to the MOBI file format from Word is covered in chapter 13: "How to Convert Your File."



* Kindle Direct Publishing monitors the price of your book on other reseller sites and matches the price automatically. You have no choice in the matter, so if one of your other resellers is running a special, Kindle Direct Publishing will immediately match the price, and you will earn your normal royalty percentage of the lower price.






Guy Kawasaki has written 12 books, 10 of which were traditionally published. His newest book is APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur - How to Publish a Book, which helps people understand how and why to self-publish.

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur - How to Publish a Book, by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch, is available as an eBook ($9.99) and in paperback ($24.99). Visit http://apethebook.com/